Difficult time for diocese schools

Sunday

Nov 25, 2012 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - Bishop Stephen E. Blaire said this week he is "absolutely committed" to continuing operation of St. George School in south Stockton, but enrollment in all 11 of the K-8 schools operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Stockton is an ongoing concern.

Roger Phillips

STOCKTON - Bishop Stephen E. Blaire said this week he is "absolutely committed" to continuing operation of St. George School in south Stockton, but enrollment in all 11 of the K-8 schools operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Stockton is an ongoing concern.

Blaire made his remarks while announcing a consulting arrangement with the University of Notre Dame that is geared toward bolstering Catholic education in the diocese.

"One of the schools we are most concerned about is St. George's," Blaire said. "We are committed to looking at it as the school not just for that parish but for all of south Stockton."

Enrollment concerns are not new for the diocese. Following the 2005-06 school year, the diocese closed 57-year-old St. Gertrude School, citing shrinking enrollment.

More than 70 students transferred from St. Gertrude to St. George for the 2006-07 academic year, pushing the latter school's enrollment to a record high of 271, according to Tom Butler, superintendent of schools for the Stockton diocese. But the subsequent economic downturn and the rise of charter schools has hit Catholic schools hard in recent years, in Stockton and nationally. Enrollment has declined steadily at St. George in the past few years and is down to 106 this year.

It's a national issue, according to Sean Kennedy, a visiting fellow at the Lexington Institute who produced a report on Catholic education that was released in July. Kennedy reported that 167 Catholic schools across the nation closed in the past year, that national Catholic school enrollment has shrunk in the past few decades from 5.2 million to 2 million and that this year for the first time more students are enrolled nationwide in charter schools than in Catholic schools.

In Stockton, officials said in 2006 they hoped the closure of St. Gertrude would only be temporary and spoke of hiring a private consulting company to study the matter. Sister Terry Davis, a spokeswoman for the diocese, told The Record at the time, "Is there a way to fund a school in a depressed area? We want to have quality Catholic education in south Stockton."

But St. Gertrude never reopened, and more than six years after its closure, the challenge for the surviving K-8 schools in the diocese has not eased. Four of the schools are in Stockton, two are in Modesto, and the others are in Lodi, Manteca, Tracy, Patterson and Turlock. Tuition varies, but the average is a bit more than $4,000 a year. All 11 schools have room for more students in at least some grades, according to Butler.

Butler said more than one-quarter of the 2,563 students at the diocese's K-8 campuses are Latino, though at St. George the Latino representation is more than 75 percent, almost all of them economically disadvantaged. Blaire said outreach to Latino parents and students is vital.

"Fifty percent of our Catholic people are Hispanic in this diocese," Blaire said. "Many of the Hispanic children cannot afford to attend Catholic school. So we want to find a way to provide education. ... We need to find a way to make it affordable for new immigrants to attend our schools."

Steven Virgadamo, an official with the consulting group from Notre Dame that will be assessing schools in the diocese in the months ahead, said making Catholic schools more accessible is a "civil rights issue."

"Parents of children who cannot afford to send them to a school are being denied a very important right for their children," Virgadamo said. "The poor should not be systemically excluded. The immigrant population should not be systemically excluded from the schools."